The Magnificent Bastards (55 page)

The NVA disappeared.

Other enemy soldiers, meanwhile, gave a wide berth to Sergeant Haddock’s squad as they worked their way down Jones Creek to a position opposite Captain Osborn’s command group. Specialist Bill Karp, the senior medic, was sitting with his back against the raised footpath when he saw two figures coming their way across the stream. The figures, in a low-to-the-ground crouch, were moving with some purpose. Karp shouldered his M16, sighted in, and pumped off half a magazine.

The two figures fell, either hit or seeking cover.

Thinking that the Barracuda platoon securing the flank on the other side of Jones Creek was farther north than it actually was, Captain Osborn shouted at Karp, “Stop, don’t fire over there—B Company is over there!”

Awww shit, Karp thought, I just got two of our guys. He had not. As Alpha Company’s wounded straggled back, Karp, who was half-deaf and had a ringing headache from his own close encounter with a mortar shell—as well as a superficial fragment wound in his right arm—treated them with battle dressings and words of encouragement. Karp, a quiet twenty-three-year-old
college dropout and draftee, was from Alice, Texas. One of the grunts he treated had lost an ear—presumably to a tracer round, because the wound was cauterized and barely bled. Karp secured a big bandage around the man’s head, and would have left it at that had the man’s buddy not said, “Doc, you think you ought to check him for anything else?” Karp had not because he had seen neither blood nor tears on the man’s fatigues. He felt pretty stupid when he lifted up the back of the casualty’s shirt and saw that the round that had removed his ear had traveled down his back just under the skin. There was a bullet hole in the muscle at the top of his shoulder, and the exit wound was down at his waist. As Karp tied more bandages and tried to maintain a conversation that would not betray to the man how badly injured he was, the one-eared, semishocked grunt kept trying to get up to see what was going on. Karp, working from his hands and knees, kept pushing the man back down and saying gently, “Just hold still now.”

While a Helix FAC helped adjust artillery to cover their move, a completely traumatized Captain Osborn—who was, ironically, awarded another Silver Star for his supposed leadership during this fiasco—instructed Alpha Annihilator to withdraw to Force Tiger. The word was passed by radio and by shouts.

With exceptions such as Specialist Karp, who moved his casualties back as a group,
³
the withdrawal was a strung-out, every-man-for-himself affair. Some GIs dropped their weapons and gear to run faster, and were crying hysterically by the time they made it back. Sergeant Haddock was another exception. His squad along the streambed was the last to pull back, and Haddock sent his men rearward one, two, or three at a time while the rest provided covering fire. Haddock went with the last group, his M16 in one hand and a radio in the other. They had to jump up and down as the mortars kept crashing in, and Haddock, exhausted, finally let go of the twenty-five pound radio. One of the shells exploded within a
half-dozen meters of Specialist Hannan, and although it did not even scratch him, it did bowl him over. When Hannan regained his senses, he saw Haddock kneeling beside him and firing his M16 at the burial mounds. Haddock looked at him. “You okay, kid?” he asked.

“I think so,” Hannan answered as he sat up and shook off the shock.

“Okay,” Haddock said. “Let’s get outta here.…”

The NVA, bursting with victorious enthusiasm, were on top of their bunkers, shouting and shooting and not caring who saw them. Officially, fifty NVA had been killed, but no grunt bought that. Alpha Annihilator had twelve KIA. “I can’t believe those great guys are dead,” Specialist Hannan wrote in a letter home. “Somehow I’m still alive. I’ll never know how in God’s name I made it out. Men were left on the battlefield wounded and crying.…”
⁴

At 1650, two fighters finally began running air strikes on the enemy positions. Meanwhile, the C&C Huey was bouncing in and out of Force Tiger to evacuate the wounded—nineteen altogether—to the 3d Medical Battalion, 3d Marine Division, at the Dong Ha Combat Base. One of the casualties was mortally wounded Staff Sergeant Dale of Alpha Three, who had a piece of plastic secured over his sucking chest wound. Lieutenant Smith and another wounded GI, loaded aboard on either side of Dale, took turns administering mouth-to-mouth during the flight. Carried off the chopper pad on stretchers, Smith and Dale ended up side by side in the triage facility, and Smith screamed frantically at the corpsmen, “Give him mouth-to-mouth, give him mouth-to-mouth!” A Navy doctor bent over Dale with his stethoscope, then quickly moved to the next
casualty. Smith, in shock, thought the doctor was abandoning Dale as hopeless. He screamed bloody murder as he tried to get up from his stretcher. Corpsmen held Smith down as they used long, blunt-tipped scissors to cut off his bloody fatigues and jungle boots. “I was mad as hell,” said Smith. “I don’t know if they gave me anything to quiet me down. They probably did. Your mind is going in a million different directions at a million miles an hour. Everything’s coming to a head—it’s like a fuse blowing.”

Pinned down in a crater, Sgt. Charles F. Desmond and Sp4 Bill A. Baird of Alpha Two were among those left behind. Both were greenseeds. Baird had been wounded in the opening moments of the engagement, presumably by an enemy-issue claymore set up at the edge of the burial mounds. The explosion had shattered his tailbone—he could neither move nor feel his legs—and shredded his jungle boots, blowing off four of his toes. Both legs were bloody and mangled. Not understanding what had happened to him, Baird, who had lost his helmet, kept firing his M16 even as he faded in and out of consciousness. He expended almost all of his ammo. When his weapon finally jammed, he started pitching hand grenades, determined to survive.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Desmond was beginning to understand that the company had pulled back without them. He shouted at two GIs with steel pots and green fatigues who were half-concealed in the tall rice to his left—but when they turned toward him, he realized that they were actually NVA.

Terrified, Desmond dropped them both with his M16.

It was dusk by then, and no one else was firing. When it got completely dark, Desmond could see the silhouettes of NVA moving across the paddies, checking bodies and recovering weapons. Desmond removed all of his gear, keeping only his Ml6 and two magazines. He whispered to the semidelirious Baird that he was going to try to get some help. With that, Desmond, a black NCO, climbed out of the crater and, presumably hoping that his dark skin would cause him to be mistaken for another NVA, he started walking toward the stream
he knew was on the left flank. The NVA were so close he could hear them talking, but he made it to the stream without being noticed despite the illumination rounds going up. Desmond slid into the concealing water and hugged the bank. He was so scared that he was shaking all over, rippling the water around him. He thought the shimmering movement would give him away, so he kept telling himself, “If you want to live, stop shaking.”

Sergeant Desmond had been in Vietnam all of two weeks.

Specialist Baird never forgave Desmond for leaving him, which was understandable but unfair. If Desmond had tried to carry Baird, they would have been an obvious target. The eighteen-year-old Baird was an unschooled country boy from Holmsville, Ohio, best known for his good humor and un-motivated approach to soldiering during his two months in the ’nam. Immobilized and alone, Baird groggily hoped that the shadows moving and stopping around him were friendlies looking for survivors. Then he heard their singsong Vietnamese voices, and four or five NVA almost tripped over him in the dark. The closest one let out a surprised shout as he swung his AK-47 around and squeezed off a quick shot. The round hit Baird’s left ear and exited cleanly through his neck just below the hairline. His head was ringing as he desperately screamed,
“Chieu hoi!”

The NVA rushed up to Baird. When they saw that he was grievously wounded and posed no threat, one of them secured a bandage around his head while explaining in English that the reason they had shot him was because “you Americans are tricky, and we thought you might get away.” The NVA took his dog tags, web gear, and jammed M16, then lifted him onto a poncho. They worked with speed and urgency. They wanted to get out of the flarelight and back to their positions. The NVA litter team stopped in a hamlet—probably Xom Phuong—where other enemy soldiers crowded around Baird. “Jesus Christ,” he muttered to himself. “You mean all these sons of bitches was out there?” The NVA gave him a few puffs on a cigaret, a sip of hot water, and a mouthful or two of rice. He started to black out again, but they poked and
prodded him, all the while jabbering, “My,
my, my”
—which he was later told was Vietnamese for American. A fresh team of NVA picked up his poncho litter and moved off toward the DMZ. As the NVA carried him through the night, Baird—who was destined to spend the next five years in prison camps known as the Plantation, the Portholes, and the Hanoi Hilton—found himself thinking back to his first week at the Americal Division base camp in Chu Lai. Everything had seemed so secure then. He had lain on an air mattress feeling a mellow buzz from a combination of warm beer and his first joint, and had looked at the beautiful beach and thought, Shit, there ain’t no goddamn war.…

During the night, between enemy mortar and artillery attacks, the LPs deployed by C/3-21 in Nhi Ha and D/3-21 in Lam Xuan East made at least seven sightings of squad- and platoon-sized groups of NVA. One enemy soldier wearing a gas mask darted close enough to Charlie Tiger’s perimeter to heave in a tear-gas grenade. Captain Leach called his LPs on an hourly basis, and at 0518 on Tuesday, 7 May 1968, the LP leader on the right flank rendered his sitrep in what began as a fatigued monotone, “Well, we’ve been observing maybe fifteen, twenty gooks for the past half-hour, runnin’ around in the paddies—hey, wait a minute—there’s a mothercomin’ tank!”

“A what? A what? A what?” Leach shot back.

“A mothercomin’ tank!” the LP leader answered with awe in his voice. He reported that the tank was headed southwest at a range of about two hundred meters before it disappeared behind a tree line. Then he said, “Can we come in? We want to come in. We want to come in.” Captain Leach denied permission—“Keep observing, see where he goes and what he does”—then contacted battalion, which contacted the 3d Marines to determine if any USMC tanks or amtracs were in the area. None were. Leach knew that the NVA had used Soviet PT-76 light amphibious tanks with 76mm main guns near Khe Sanh during the Tet Offensive. He was persuaded that an NVA tank really was out there, especially when the ARVN
advisers at Alpha 1 reported shortly thereafter that they too could hear what might be, a tank. Artillery and air strikes were called in, although the USAF flareship and USMC aerial observer overhead never could see a definite target. Regardless, it was an unnerving episode. “We could hear the tread going
clank-clank-clank,”
said Sergeant Coulthard, “and everybody was panicking because we’d already fired all our LAWs.” Coulthard, however, could not hear a tank engine, and when he investigated with his M16-mounted night scope he, for one, concluded that the whole incident was the result of strained nerves and overactive imaginations. “With the starlight, we could see that the wind had come up and was dragging flare canisters across the dry paddies by their attached parachutes,” he explained. “You could hear them going
clank-clank-clank
. The sound really carried at night. We laughed about it—we was just kind of relieved—but other guys said, ‘No, it sure the hell ain’t flares, there’s some tanks out there,’ so who knows. But I never could see it.”

Informed of the disaster that Alpha Annihilator had walked into, the company exec, 1st Lt. Robert V. Gibbs, helicoptered up from Chu Lai in the morning. Gibbs, a blunt, no-nonsense character, questioned Sergeant Stone, whom he knew to be one of the company’s best squad leaders. Gibbs wanted to know the status of their missing. When Stone said that the men were still out there, Gibbs shouted, “Whaddya mean they’re still out there? What the fuck are you talking about, you sonofabitch?” Stone was in tears. Gibbs stomped over to Captain Osborn’s position and barked, “How the fuck could you leave our guys out there?”

Osborn shouted back, “Look, I’m the company commander—and we had to!”

“Christ,” replied Gibbs. “Well, when the hell are we going back out to get ’Em? They could still be alive out there.”

Inexplicably, no recovery mission was launched that day. Instead, the Gimlets improved their positions at Force Tiger and prepped Xom Phuong with artillery. Two missing men who were able to stumble back did so on their own, including
Sergeant Desmond of Alpha Two, who came across the rice paddies waving his arms and hollering, “Alpha Gimlets!” Grunts crowded happily around him, and Desmond, relieved beyond words, could not suppress an ear-to-ear grin. Desmond was awarded the Silver Star. The greenseed sergeant also got out of the field after his traumatic experience. The battalion surgeon said that he had combat fatigue—“He did well until he got back, then he kind of fell apart”

The enemy shelled them during the day, then in the late afternoon an NVA column of approximately two hundred soldiers was spotted moving south along Jones Creek at a point some sixteen hundred meters northwest of Force Tiger. “The dumbshits were coming down in the open in broad daylight,” said Captain Leach, who instructed the 106mm recoilless rifles and the three USMC tanks attached to his task force to open fire. The tanks cut loose with .50-caliber machine guns and 90mm main guns, and the NVA disappeared into the tree lines along Jones Creek. Four artillery batteries fired into the area while Leach made contact with one of the cruisers offshore, which then provided eight-inch fire. “Naval gunfire was blowing the shit out of that area,” remarked Leach. “They just put it right on top of ’Em, so I’m talking to the ship and I’m really gettin’ ’Em fired up. I’m saying, ‘Jesus Christ, you’re
killin
’Em! Keep going, keep going!’ and they’re going crazy out there on the ship. This was right down their alley. They loved it.”